“You have lodgings, n’est-ce pas?”
A sudden, startling silence greeted the first suggestion of foreign accent. Cards paused in mid-air, pipes ceased to draw, tipplers craned their necks to listen, and madame surveyed me deliberately, even a bit disdainfully, from crown to toe. Satisfied evidently, with her inspection, she admitted that she had been known to house travelers and hurried away to bring the register, while the smoking and the drinking and the playing were slowly and half-heartedly resumed. Madame scrutinized intently each stroke of the coarse pen as I filled in the various blanks, puzzled several moments over my “passport,” and dropping all her stiff dignity, became suddenly garrulous:
“What! You are an American? Why, another American has lodged here. It was in 1882. He was making the tour of the world on a bicycle. He came from Boston”—she pronounced it with a distressing nasal—“but I could not understand his French. He did not pronounce the R. He said ‘foncé’ when he meant ‘français.’ for ‘terre’ he said ‘tèah.’ I will give you his bed. He had not many hairs on his head. Do you eat ragoût also in America? He wore such funny pince-nez. Fine wine, n’est-ce pas? He had hurt his foot—” and thus she chattered on, through my supper and up the stairs to my chamber.
The room once graced by the man from Boston was stone-floored, with whitewashed walls, and large enough to have housed a squad of infantry. Of its two beds, hung with snow-white curtains, I preferred the one nearer the window. Unfortunately, my compatriot of the pince-nez had chosen the other and madame would not hear of my violating the precedent thus established. The price of this lodging, and the usual one in the rural inns of France, was fifteen cents.
There were times when my zealous efforts to spend for lodging as few sous as possible brought me to temporary grief. The night following my sojourn in La Charité is a case in point. I reached St. Pierre le Moutier some time after dark, and, upon inquiry for the cheapest auberge, was directed up a dismal alleyway. On the fringe of the open country I stumbled upon a ramshackle stone building, one end of which was a dwelling for man, while the other housed his domestic animals. Inside, under a sputtering excuse for a lamp, huddled two men, a woman and a girl, around a table that canted up against the wall as if it had borne too much wine in its long existence and become chronically unsteady on its legs thereby. So preoccupied was the quartet in devouring slabs of dull-brown bread and a watery soup from a common bowl in which floated a few stray cabbage-leaves that my entrance passed unnoticed.
Advancing to attract attention I brought disaster. For in the semi-darkness I stepped on the end of a board that supported two legs of the tipsy table, causing the bowl of soup to slide into the woman’s arms, and the loaf to roll about on the earth floor. The mishap, evidently no new experience, aroused no comment, but it gained me a hearing and brought me into the conversation. Of the two men, one was the proprietor and the second a traveler of the tramp variety who, though posing as a Parisian, spoke a decidedly mongrel language. With the fluency of a stranded tragedian he launched forth in a raging narration of his misfortunes. French at all resembling the educated tongue had become as familiar to me as English, but the patois and slang in which the fellow unfolded the story of a persecuted life would have daunted an international interpreter. I caught the drift of his remarks by making him repeat each sentence twice or thrice, but he ended with a: “Heing! Tu comprinds ma’reux le frinçais;” and I was forced to admit that if the jargon he got off were “frinçais,” I certainly did.
The younger, and consequently less begrimed of the females, led the way to my “room,” which turned out to be a hole over the stable, some four feet high, approached by an outside stairway, and containing two of the filthiest cots a vivid imagination could have pictured. To my disgust I found that one of the beds was reserved for my friend of the uncouth tongue. A half-hour later, unstable after a final bottle of wine with the aubergiste, he stumbled into the den and proceeded to make night hideous—awake, by his multiloquence, asleep, by a rasping snore. A dozen times I awoke from a half-conscious nap to find him sitting cross-legged in his cot, puffing furiously at a cigarette, above the feeble glow of which glistened his cat-like eyes as he stared at me across the intervening darkness. At daybreak he was gone and I departed soon after.
There is really no reason why the French roadster should go hungry in autumn. That he does, is due to a strange national prejudice unknown in America; for at that season half the highways of France are lined with hedges heavy with blackberries. At first I looked with suspicion on a fruit left ungathered by the thrifty peasantry, but, coming one morning upon a hedge unusually burdened with berries, I satisfied myself as to their identity and fell to picking a capful. A band of peasants, on the way to the fields, halted to gaze at me in astonishment and burst into uproarious laughter.
“Mais, mon vieux,” cried a plowman. “Que diable vas tu faire de ces choses-là?”
“Eat them, of course,” I answered.